Iraqi officials critical of the Hoover Institution's storage of a large collection of Saddam Hussein-era documents visited Stanford in May, seeking the return of the records to Iraq. Richard Sousa, director of the Hoover library and archives, met with Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq Library and Archive, and deputy culture minister Taher al-Humoud. Sousa reiterated Hoover's commitment to return the documents, under safe conditions for them in Iraq, by 2013. That timeline is part of an agreement with the Iraq Memory Foundation, the organization that transferred the records to Hoover, citing U.S. permission to move and preserve them following the Iraq War ("Grim Treasure," Farm Report, November/December 2008).
Attempts by STANFORD to reach Eskander produced no response. Sousa said a key sticking point in discussions about the documents, whose placement at Hoover has been endorsed previously by the Iraqi prime minister's office, is the waiting time before their return. Copies of many of the documents, in Arabic, are available for research at Hoover.
